King County Metro will significantly scale back the number of scheduled bus trips across the county this September, impacting 4% of trips across the entire system, the transit agency announced on Thursday. First reported by The Seattle Times, the changes to schedules are intended to better reflect what Metro can actually provide, and will impact peak-only bus routes the most. However, some of Metro’s most frequent routes will also see reductions.
A shortage of operators and bus mechanics and supply chain issues have been impacting the ability to repair buses are the primary culprits the agency pointed to in its announcement.
Peak-only Routes 15, 16, 18, 29, 55, 64, 114, 121, 167, 190, 214, 216, 217, 232, 237, 268, 301, 304, 320, and 342 will be officially suspended as of September 3, indefinitely. Many of these 20 routes see a fairly significant portion of their trips cancelled right now, but cancellations are also spread out over other routes. The peak-only routes have been much slower to regain ridership.
Katie Chalmers, Metro’s Managing Director of Service Development, explained that these routes were selected because of those ridership numbers and their overall equity scores that take into account what geographic area of the county they serve, and what replacement service is available nearby.
Meanwhile, Routes 7, 10, 20, 28, 36, 73, 79, 225, 230, 231, 255, 345 — some of the agency’s most high-ridership routes — will see trips removed from their schedules to give riders a more accurate picture of arrival times across the system.
“Today’s conversation is a challenging one for us, because it’s not what we want to do. We want to be in a growth pattern,” Metro General Manager Michelle Allison said Thursday. “But we also recognize over the past couple months, listening to our employees, and listening to our riders, that we have to stabilize the system and provide reliable service, so we can then build on top of it to get to that larger Metro Connects [long-range] vision.”
Allison told reporters this week that the agency is currently having to cancel 3% of trips systemwide due to operator availability, and emphasized that the changes planned for September aren’t an actual reduction in service but a recalibration of scheduled trips to better reflect reality. Metro went through a similar recalibration last fall, similarly scaling back scheduled trips on a broad number of routes. The Urbanist warned those fall service cuts should “raise alarm bells” for policymakers warning of the need to tackle the operator shortage. That has yet to happen, but nonetheless, by March, the agency had believed it was ready to enter a growth period again, which turned out to be too optimistic.
“We were really hopeful that we would get the workforce and supply chain issues to even out, and to be at a more steady state than folks are experiencing. So we kept service on the street in the hope that return-to-work would manifest in a big way and we would have the service there to meet those ridership needs. And that didn’t happen,” Allison said. “We were hopeful, and we had a lot of service out there to meet the needs of recovery, and they simply didn’t result.”
While the labor market is tight, both industry-wide and service sector-wide, other agencies have not struggled as mightily as Metro. In contrast, LA Metro just announced it had hired 1,000 transit operators, allowing it to fully restore service to pre-pandemic levels. In a post Monday, the agency laid out its successful strategy, which included a union contract that raised pay and allowed the agency to hire new operators at full-time hours rather than requiring that they start at part-time. King County Metro faces similar obstacles in recruiting, still unaddressed.
